Last week, I hired a plumber to install a new faucet in the kitchen’s sink. It was a changed motivated by aesthetic reasons: the old faucet did not have a nice look, perhaps because it has been used for more than ten years. But it was working well, or so I thought.

One hundred and thirty years ago, on November 18, 1883, railroad companies in the United States and Canada changed time. In fact, a century and almost a third after that decision, we are still following the time established by the railroad industry, a time now globalized, even i…

When I was a child, every Saturday morning my father took me to a second-hand store to buy used books. Several decades later and now living at the other end of the continent, I still have many of those books. Even more important, I never lost the habit of buying books. The problem is that books re…